Last term I taught parallel undergraduate and Masters seminars exploring the creation of knowledge systems in museums and the effects of shifts towards the digital on the organization of knowledge and museum epistemologies. All the students had to create a project that digitally presented a series of objects, drawn from across UCL Museums and Collections and created a new digital collection environment. The project aimed not to create an online exhibition but to think about the potentials, and limitations, of digital representation and modes of organization for creating knowledge about both specific objects and from the collecting together of different objects.…

Figure 1. The Artist Network Diagram in Inventing Abstraction: 1910-1925, an exhibition at The Museum of Modern Art, December 23, 2012–April 15, 2013, organized by Leah Dickerman with Masha Chlenova. Courtesy of The Museum of Modern Art

The recently-opened centennial celebration of abstract art, Inventing Abstraction, 1910–1925 at the Museum of Modern Art, has been lauded for offering a broadly inclusive and interdisciplinary perspective on hallowed art historical terrain.[1] Alongside modernist titans like Malevich and Mondrian, the exhibition spotlights comparatively unfamiliar figures like Suzanne Duchamp, and Polish Constructivist Waclaw Szpakowski. Curator Leah Dickerman further stresses the transmedial reach of abstraction beyond the traditional domains of painting and sculpture, by foregrounding abstract photography, music, dance, and poetry, paralleling the institution’s own disciplinary re-orientation beyond painting and sculpture.…